Leslie S. Klinger is one of the world’s foremost authorities on the twin icons of the Victorian era, Sherlock Holmes and Dracula. He is the author if The New Annotated Dracula, winner of an Edgar award, and later this month will be teaching a course for UCLA Extension called “Dracula and His World.”
At least a rudimentary understanding of Victorian history is necessary to appreciate the contemporary readership for Dracula. By the beginning of Victoria’s reign in 1837, Britain was in the process of not only creating the Industrial Revolution but becoming the greatest industrialized nation in Europe. Spurred on by the acquisition of overseas territories, England witnessed an exponential burst of industrial growth. New, surprisingly complex forms of commerce arose, much of it as a response to the masses who suddenly swelled cities like Manchester, Birmingham, and London, creating sprawling urban centres where crime and poverty abounded.
By 1868, when Benjamin Disraeli became Prime Minister, Britain had unequivocally become the world’s most powerful nation, and Disraeli loudly and frequently advocated this expansion, epitomized by the coronation of Victoria, at his instigation, as Empress of India in 1876. Disraeli’s “imperialist” foreign policies were further justified by invoking generalizations partly derived from Darwin’s theory of evolution. The argument was that imperialism was a manifestation of what Kipling referred to as “the white man’s burden.” The Empire existed, argued its supporters, not for the benefit—economic, strategic, or otherwise—of Britain, but in order that “primitive” peoples, incapable of self-government, could, with British guidance, eventually become Christian and civilized. This mentality served to legitimize Britain’s acquisition of portions of central Africa and her domination, in concert with other European powers, of China and other parts of Asia.
In the Victorian age, the study of “natural philosophy” and “natural history” became “science,” and students, who, in an earlier time, had been exclusively gentlemen and clerical naturalists, became, after their course of study, professional scientists. In the general population, belief in natural laws and continuous progress began to grow, and there was frequent interaction among science, government, and industry. As science education was expanded and formalized, a fundamental transformation occurred in beliefs about nature and the place of humans in the universe. A revival of religious activity, largely unmatched since the days of the Puritans, swept England. This religious revival shaped that code of moral behaviour which became known as Victorianism. Above all, religion occupied a place in the public consciousness that it had not had a century before and did not retain in the twentieth century.
The end of the Victorian age brought a variety of literature to the public. Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae (1889), several novels of J. M. Barrie (who later wrote Peter Pan), Hall Caine’s The Bondman (1890), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and several of Wilde’s plays, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1891) and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1893), many works of Rudyard Kipling, and H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) and The Invisible Man (1897) all caught the public’s eye, to greater or lesser degrees. American works such as Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) also drew attention.
A runaway “best-seller” of the decade was George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894), a novel that, with its striking central image of a swooning young woman, bears some similarities to Stoker’s narrative.5 Although little read today, the book told of a young artist and his model, Trilby, who are lovers but separated by social class. When the artist leaves her, she falls under the influence of Svengali, a psychically vampiric impresario and hypnotist, who moulds her into a great singer, “La Svengali.” However, she is only able to—and is compelled to—sing in his trances. When Svengali himself dies, she appears to be freed, but a picture of him causes her to mechanically sing again, and she dies.
Upon publication, the novel caused a sensation in Britain and America. In its first year of publication, it sold 200,000 copies in America alone, and the term “Svengali” came to be applied to any hypnotist. The book was turned into a popular play, revivified the allure of la vie bohème, last glorified in Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie bohème (1851), and probably sparked interest in Puccini’s 1896 opera La Bohème.
Dracula is in many ways a book of its time. It reflects the Victorian fascination with the supernatural and the rising interest in Spiritualism and the nature of death. Its tale of the invasion of England by a dangerous foreigner mirrors larger concerns about Eastern European immigrants and the Irish question. The women of Dracula exemplify the Victorians’ struggle with the role of women, with Lucy embodying the traditional role and Mina the changing role. The narrative also depicts the confrontation between science and invention, in the form of typewriters, phonographs, cameras, telegraphs, the railroads, and the like, versus the superstitions and traditions of prior years. For a picture of the late Victorian period and its turmoil, Dracula encapsulates nearly every issue of the idea in its shocking story.
Professor Klinger, I mean no disrespect to a “guest guide”; I have The New Annotated Dracula so was most enthused to see you here. However, this post is copied verbatim from the first section in the introduction to your book, the essay entitled “The Context of Dracula”.
I would have liked to see something new–such as how you researched over 400 bibliographical entries for the book, what it feels like to live with the text for however long that took, or the reasons behind your particular approach to Stoker’s work with your employing of the “gentle fiction” that the characters are all real people– and just how does a contemporary scholar arrive at the decision to devote his entire life to these two Victorian authors (Doyle and Stoker) in particular? You know, the sort of thing students at your UCLA class would be curious about.
(By the way: don’t anyone go rushing to Professor Klinger’s Intro unless you’ve read or seen a book-true Dracula before–there’s a major spoiler in there.)
I’m delighted that someone actually read my introduction to “The New Annotated Dracula.” I’d be happy to contribute on the other topics you mention, but my limited assignment was to provide some historical context, and so the quotation from my introduction (note that the last paragraph is new)!
Exactly–I asked Mr. Klinger to write on this subject and, as it turned out, he had a lengthy passage from his introduction that fit the bill perfectly. It seemed a little silly to ask him to rewrite it just for the sake of calling it “new”.
I’m actually getting hung up on some of the historical details in Dracula. It would be helpful to have a better understanding of how infrastructures like the post and cross-county travel worked, for instance. From the book it often seems like people are receiving letters a day or two after they were sent, and Van Helsing is making overnight trips between England and Amsterdam.
Vampires I’m willing to suspend disbelief over, but the mechanics of the book are a sticking point for me.
This has been a source of confusion for me too, is it really that easy to spend the night in Amsterdam and make it back again? Also, why is he actually going there? Are there no sources of garlic flowers closer by? Is it just a plot device to ensure that through some peculiar twist of fate Lucy continues to be mysteriously drained of her blood every other night? Van Helsing continues to be extremely irritating by his refusal to tell anyone anything at all about what’s happening.
I have come to the rather disappointed conclusion that everything in this novel is just a plot device.
Well, on the subject of travel – through all the death in recent chapters, I found it a little off-putting how much travel away from urgent affairs was occuring. Arthur’s presence was requested in the afternoon and he arrived before six p.m.?! I understand the father is deathly ill, but if you’re that close to two horribly ill people, surely you can spend time with both. And please let it be discovered that there is something equally urgent requiring Van Helsing’s time in Amsterdam. As soon as the garlic flowers show up in the story, it’s evident that he understands the peril, whether he’s yet ready to share with others his fears. For all the talk of concern, the actions tell a different story.
And an aside – I greatly prefer to read McNicol’s PDF’s rather than the Project Gutenberg text. Are more coming soon?
Dr. Klinger, thank you for providing this synopsis. I am not very familiar with the historical context, having read only minimally (and not recently) from this time period. I suspect that Dracula’s most lasting effect on me will be as a history lesson.
I am curious as to the role and position held by physicians. I was under the impression that at the time Dracula was written, physician education was fairly informal and only lightly informed by science – yet Van Helsing and Seward, as physicians, seem to hold significant social status. Can you help me place the physician’s role and education in proper historical perspective?
I’ll leave it to Leslie to fill in the details re education. But this might be relevant (I posted something about this earlier, in another context, on one of the Forum threads, so pardon the repetition.) Bram Stoker had three brothers who were medical doctors. Best known was Thornley, a brain surgeon and for a time president of the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin. He was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1895.
And on the question of medicine, and transfusions in particular, was the issue of blood type unknown at the time? Are we just lucky that all the menfolk happened to be her type?
Blood typing did not make an appearance until the first decade of the 20th century, a few years after “Dracula” was published.
Professor Klnger’s annotated Dracula has answers to all these questions, including a long discussion on the history of blood transfusion. It’s taking me twice as long to read each chapter because many of the notes are quite interesting, though I find it amazing that anyone studied the “authenticity” of the dates on the letters and diary entries!
When you boil it all down, Dracula is a procedural … a fast-moving, plot-driven story whose author relies as much on his ability to research and construct a framework of enough plausibility that even the biggest train-schedule geek in the world could have read the book and given Stoker a pass. (Here, I imagine a bunch of 19-year olds sitting in a pub … “Okay, so even if Van Helsing caught the ferry as the tide was going OUT, steam boats of the age could only have made 6 knots TOPS. Hey, can we get some more Hot Pockets over here?!”
The great thing about procedurals is that they’re a ripping fast read (a la Tom Clancy and every episode of Law & Order ever.) The downside is that once we as readers move beyond the time period in which they were written, crucial pieces of the plot – train schedules, medical procedures, class distinctions – that would have been accepted as holy writ at the time of publication become blurred, antiquated and irrelevant.
While I initially raised eyebrows over Prof. Klinger’s “gentle fiction,” I’ve since given the device a pass. It’s clear that Klinger’s crawled through source and secondary material to annotate the volume. And often times, annotated volumes do *such* a thorough job of contextualizing their material that the drama of the story is beaten to a pulp with the Logic and Truth Hammer. The GentleFiction™ adds back a little bit of the energy that any of us bring to a good story and allows us to suspend disbelief.